Bruce McCormack

Bruce Lindley McCormack (born 1952) is an American theologian and scholar of the theology of Karl Barth. He is currently Chair in Modern Theology at University of Aberdeen.

Biography McCormack earned a bachelor degree in economic/business administration and religion from Point Loma Nazarene University in 1976, and began his journey of theological education in the Covenant Theological Seminary (Missouri) in the late 1970s. In 1978, he transferred his studies to his original denominational seminary, Nazarene Theological Seminary and earned his M.Div. degree there in 1980. He recalled being moved from a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective to a Reformed one in Nazarene Theological Seminary after he was disappointed by John Wesley's doctrine of prevenient grace. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1989.

McCormack was Lecturer in Reformed Theology in the University of Edinburgh from 1987-1991. He later returned to his alma mater, Princeton Theological Seminary and took the role of Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of Systematic Theology from 1991-1998, and became the Weyerhaeuser Professor of Systematic Theology starting from 1998 onwards. From 2009–2022, McCormack was the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology. Since 2023, he has been Chair of Modern Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

In 1980, he married Mary Schmitt McCormack who served as the director of women's and children’s ministries in Stone Hill Church of Princeton.

Honors McCormack was awarded the international Karl Barth Prize by the Board of the Evangelical Church of the Union in Germany in 1998, for his publication Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (1995). This signaled a paradigm shift in the reading of Barth.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena in Germany in 2004.

McCormack delivered the 2008 T.F. Torrance Lectures ("The Humility of the Eternal Son: A Reformed Version of Kenotic Christology") in the University of St. Andrews, the 2011 Croall Lectures ("Abandoned by God: The Death of Christ in Systematic, Historical, and Exegetical Perspective") in the University of Edinburgh, and the 2011 Kenneth Kantzer Lectures ("The God Who Graciously Elects: Seven Lectures on the Doctrine of God") in the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Works Books

Articles and chapters